As a child in Nantes, France, the 26-year-old artist Victor Siret would often lose himself in the gothic foliage of a six-foot-long needlepoint canvas made by his grandmother, who started teaching him needlework when he was 10.
When Siret went to art school in 2016, he kept up the practice, even as his professors told him “this was work for housewives,” he says.
Drawing on a deep visual knowledge of American mass media, he filled tightly composed canvases with buildings shaped like cheeseburgers and packs of cigarettes, set against radioactive shades of yellow and pink.
A suited corpse floats in a Hockneyesque swimming pool, and winking emblems of gay culture — a cowboy boot, a sauna sign — crowd the edges of strip malls.